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Struth’s interest in China dates back to his youthful
interest in the ideological forces which shape and control
cultures. In high school he gave a paper about the country
based on a book by the German journalist and political scientist
Klaus Mehnert (China nach dem Sturm/China After the Storm) published in 1971, which analysed the period of the Cultural
Revolution.

In the early 1980s Struth became friends with the
psychoanalysts Hannah Erdrich-Hartmann and Ingo Hartmann.
Hannah had first visited China in 1972 and had a deep knowledge
of the country and its history. Together with the couple
and a group of other friends, Struth began studying Tai Qi with
the master Ma Jiang Bao in Düsseldorf in the late 1980s. The
group then decided to undertake a series of study trips to China
and prepared by organising a seminar at which each of the
participants gave a paper about one particular theme—Taoism,
Buddhism, Chinese history, geography, painting, calligraphy,
ceramics, etc. On his second visit to China in 1997, Struth took
a portrait of the family of Ma Jiang Bao in Beijing as well as an
individual portrait of Ma’s 97-year-old father, Ma Yue Liang.

In total Struth visited China four times between 1995
and 2002. The group travelled to Beijing, Shanghai and Wuhan,
as well as through famous landscapes such as the Yangtse River,
the Gobi Desert and Inner Mongolia and saw factories, farms
and pilgrimage sites. The photographs Struth took in China depict
historic landscapes, busy city streets and in one instance —
Tian An Men Square, Beijing (1997) — a place of national ideological
and political importance.

Struth was also fascinated by
the ‘doomed’ city of Wushan on the Yangtse River, subsequently
flooded following the construction of the Three Gorges Dam.

The frenetic experience of the urban environment in
China stimulated a significant change in Struth’s approach to
taking pictures of city streets. Many of the street photographs
made in Beijing, Shanghai and Wuhan include crowds of people,
cars and bicycles in addition to the dense urban environment.
While working on the Museum Photographs, Struth had
developed his observational skills so that he could read the
movements of people within the viewfinder and wait until the
configuration of people in the picture seemed right. He applied
a similar technique in response to the challenge of the busy
urban environments in China.

A small number of Struth’s Museum Photographs had
depicted crowds of people in motion. Several street photographs
from China, such as Jianghan Lu, Wuhan (1995), are
almost overloaded with visual information, forcing the eye of
the viewer to move restlessly across the picture. Other street
photographs were made at the beginning of the day when the
streets were comparatively empty and resemble more closely
Struth’s earlier city photographs, although by this time he was
working only in colour.

The first street photographs from China were presented
in 1996 at an exhibition at the Marian Goodman Gallery in
Paris entitled Photos de Chine.